Stefano Evangelista Awarded Fellowship to Explore Cosmopolitanism in Berlin and London

Fellow in English Stefano Evangelista has been named the BUA Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Centre for British Studies in the Humboldt University, Berlin.

The fellowship will provide substantial funding over three years for Professor Evangelista and his research group for a project entitled “The Boundaries of Cosmopolis: Berlin and London”. By exploring not only the literary relations between the two cities, but also cosmopolitan networks within each city, they will try to unravel how the optimistic discourse on cosmopolitanism also created forms of exclusion by setting new boundaries. The group’s work will include extensive archival work, along with a series of early-career workshops with invited speakers from the UK, Europe and the US. It will culminate in the Harvard Institute for World Literature coming to Humboldt-Universität in the summer of 2026.

Professor Evangelista is a long-standing Fellow and member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for British Studies; he has collaborated extensively with one of its professors, Gesa Stedman, most recently on the AHRC funded project entitled Happy in Berlin? English Writers in the City, the 1920s and Beyond.

This fellowship also forms part of the Oxford-Berlin Research Partnership, which links Oxford with the Berlin University Alliance. The fellowship will enable Professor Evangelista to strengthen the academic links between the two cities. 

Professor Evangelista says of the award: ‘This fellowship will enable me to set up a small research group and host a series of workshops and events in Berlin over the next three years. The project explores how literature embodies ideas of world citizenship in the period that goes from the 1880s to the 1930s.

‘The aim of our group’s work is to develop a critical understanding of the concept of cosmopolitanism from a literary point of view, paying particular attention to the tensions and difficulties this involves, and to moments of crisis. It’s a big opportunity to develop my work on literary cosmopolitanism and world literature, and to support the careers of younger scholars.'